Academic staff

Dr Mukulika’s Banerjee 's current research interests are on the cultural meanings of democracy. Her most recent publication is Why India Votes? (2014) in which she explores the reasons behind India's rising trends of voter participation. She is currently completing a manuscript based on 15 years of engagement with a village in India to explain the sources of democratic thinking in Indian social life. Dr Banerjee was awarded her PhD from the University of Oxford in 1994 based on field research in Pakistan’s Khyber-Pakhtoonkhwa (North West Frontier Province). It was published as her first book, The Pathan Unarmed (2001); she has co-authored The Sari (2003), a book on the modernity of fashion, and edited Muslim Portraits (2007), a collection of 12 Muslim life-stories in South Asia.

Professor Gardner’s work focuses on issues of globalisation, migration and economic change in Bangladesh and its transnational communities in the United Kingdom. Her most recent research arises from an ESRC-DfID grant, ‘Mining, Livelihoods and Social Networks in Bangladesh’, and involves the role of multinationals and competing narratives of ‘development’ and ‘un-development’ in Sylhet, where Chevron are now operating a large gas plant. The project focuses on corporate programmes of community engagement and discordant ideologies of philanthropy and development.

Professor Chris Fuller specialises in India. He conducted fieldwork among the Nayars and Syrian Christians in Kerala in 1971-2, and the priests at the great temple of Madurai in Tamil Nadu in 1976-7, 1994-5 and on other visits until 2002. During this period, Fuller also worked extensively on the anthropology of popular Hinduism. In 2003-05, he participated in a research project that focused on middle-class company managers and software professionals in Chennai (Madras). In 2005-8, with Haripriya Narasimhan, he carried out research on Tamil Brahmans, focusing on this traditional elite's modern transformation into a migratory, urbanised, trans-national, middle-class community. Fuller’s current scholarly work is on the history of the anthropology of India.

Professor Jonathan Parry has conducted field research in various parts of India, including a sub-Himalayan region, where he focused on the classic anthropological themes of caste, kinship, and marriage, and Banaras, where he studied the various communities of "sacred specialists". More recently, Professor Parry has been doing fieldwork on industrial workers in the central Indian steel town of Bhilai in Chhattisgarh.

Professor Athar Hussain has research interests on urbanisation trends in China, economic transformation, regional inequality in South Asia, and regional integration. He is a frequent commentator on Indian and Pakistani politics, bilateral relationships, and foreign relations.

Muhammad Adeel holds a Bachelor’s degree in urban planning and a MS degree in Remote Sensing and GIS, from Pakistan. His masters research analysed historical patterns of urban expansion in Islamabad’s rural area through satellite images and population census data. Recently, Adeel has completed PhD in Urban Planning from the University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong where he also served as teaching assistant for BA in Urban Studies program. His PhD dissertation examines links between physical accessibility, mobility and activity participation in Pakistan. Adeel joined LSE Cities in October 2015 as Research Officer and he would be working on GIS based spatial analysis of cities, primarily in the Resource Urbanism project that aims to examine the two way interactions between access to resources (energy and land), human behaviors (activities and mobility patterns) and urban morphology (form, density) in four Asian cities; Kuwait, Abu Dhabi, Singapore and Hong Kong.

Ricky Burdett is Professor of Urban Studies and director of LSE Cities and the Urban Age programme. His research focuses on the interactions between the physical and social worlds in the contemporary city and how urbanisation affects social and environmental sustainability. He oversaw ‘Urban India: Understanding the Maximum City’, Urban Age’s examination of the social, economic and physical contours of the four largest metropolitan regions in India.

Julia King is an architectural designer and urban researcher at LSE Cities. At LSE Cities she has worked on ‘Super-diverse streets: Economies and spaces of urban migration in UK Cities’ and is currently working on initiatives in India. Her research is concerned with housing, sanitation infrastructure, urban planning, and participatory design processes. She has won numerous awards including a Holcim Award (2011), SEED Award for ‘Excellence in Public Interest Design’ (2014), Emerging Woman Architect of the Year (2014) and short listed for the World Design Impact Prize (2013) and the Deutsche Bank Urban Age Award (2014). She has taught at the Bartlett School of Architecture, Architectural Association and the CASS, Faculty of Art, Architecture and Design; where she recently completed her PhD-by-practice titled ‘Incremental Cities: Discovering the Sweet Spot for making town-within-a-city’ which looked at resettlement colonies in Delhi, India. Julia also teaches on the MSc City Design and Social Science.

Philipp Rode is Executive Director of LSE Cities and Senior Research Fellow at LSE. As researcher and consultant he manages interdisciplinary projects comprising urban governance, transport, city planning and urban design. The focus of his current work is on cities and climate change. He has previously researched on governing urban transport and spatial development in India and written on Mumbai’s compact urban form and transport efficiency as a model for a sustainable transport.

Dr Bandyopadhyay is Research Associate at the Suntory and Toyota International Centres for Economics and Related Disciplines and Senior Lecturer in Economics at Queen Mary, University of London. Her research focuses on economic growth and development, measurement of inequality and econometrics. Bandyopadhyay’s recent publications on India examine the trend of convergence clubs in incomes across Indian states and the impact of fiscal management and infrastructure on economic polarisation.

Dr Besley is School Professor of Economics and Political. His research, which mostly has a policy focus, is in the areas of development economics, public economics and political economy. His past work on India has examined the regulation of land markets and tenancy reform, determinants of state governments’ responsiveness to food shortages and the consequences of labour regulation for industrial development

Professor Burgess' areas of research interest include development economics, public economics, political economy and labour economics. His research focuses on identifying policy and institutional reforms which are capable of delivering higher growth and lower poverty in developing countries. His current research examines the cost of international disintegration by studying the economic and trade effects of Partition on modern-day India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. He has previously published on the unequal effects of liberalisation, government responsiveness, social banking, poverty, and the implications of climate change in India. He has consulted extensively for the World Bank and the Indian Government

Dr Fischer is Lecturer in Economics and co-director for the finance programme at the International Growth Centre. His research agenda focuses on combining economic theory, field experiments, and more traditional empirical analysis to understand how economic development works. He focuses on less developed countries, particularly development finance and how firms function. He has previously published on access to finance to promote inclusion in India.

Professor Sutton's research focuses on processes of globalisation, trade liberalisation, and economic transformations. His publications on India include a book on firms’ capabilities and their impact on countries’ wealth, an analysis of the auto-component supply chain in India and China, and a study on productivity and quality for computer numerically controlled machine tools produced by leading Indian manufacturers

Professor Ghatak is an applied microeconomic theorist with a focus on economic development. His research studies the micro-foundations of market and non-market institutions that govern the allocation of resources in underdeveloped countries; incentive issues in the public sector; property rights and tenancy reform; and microfinance. Ghatak’s recent work on India analyses land acquisition and compensation policies in West Bengal; continuing preference for intra-caste marriage; and welfare beneficiary attitudes toward cash and in-kind transfers. He is also the lead economist of the International Growth Centre’s India (Bihar) programme.

Dr Howlett is Senior Lecturer in Economic History and his research interests include the British economy in the First and Second World Wars, labour markets in the railway industry, economic growth and convergence, and distribution dynamics. His research on knowledge transfers includes a case study on how technical facts travel in Tamil Nadu, India.

Professor Roy focuses on the contribution of the artisan and traditional forms of useful knowledge in the making of the modern Indian economy. He has published books on the economic history of early modern India and India’s historic role in the world economy as well as a recent paper on Indian industrialisation. Dr Roy’s work on the sources of economic change in modern India suggests a more varied outcome of colonialism and globalisation on the economy of the region than is usually considered. His ongoing work connects India with debates in global history, and involves a study of standards of living, law, guild, states, and science and technology in a comparative frame.

Dr Paravisini's research focuses on the incentives of agents in financial institutions, and the role of banks in the transmission and amplification of real shocks. His recent work on India examines whether religion or caste connections in the banking sector impact loan outcome.

Professor Kabeer's research interests include gender, poverty, social exclusion, labour markets and livelihoods, social protection, and citizenship. Much of her research is focused on South and South East Asia. Her publications include studies on Bangladeshi women and labour supply decision-making, the impact of social mobilisation and microfinance South Asia and social justice in relation to the MDGs.

Dr Atkinson’s research interests cover a number of aspects of environmental policy and appraisal. He has published extensively on the subject of sustainable development. Much of this research has examined how policymakers might construct better measures of economic progress through 'green accounting', particularly comprehensive measures of (genuine) saving. An additional component of his research is the application of cost-benefit analysis particularly stated preference methods to appraise environmental (and related) policies. He is on the advisory board of the Green Indian States Trust (GIST).

Jennifer Baka

Associate Professor of Geography and Environment

Dr Baka’s research critically examines the politics of energy policy. Her particular focus is to both analyse the micro-politics of policy formation and to evaluate the social and environmental impacts resulting on the ground. For her dissertation, Dr Baka developed an interdisciplinary framework combining political and industrial ecology to examine the concept of 'wastelands' as it relates to India's biofuel programme.

Professor Jones’ research interests are in urban geography, with a particular interest in how people make use of the city and how cities are represented by policy and practice. He is especially interested in policy practice toward the 'slum' and the representations of urban poverty through media, civil society and practitioner expertise. He has conducted research in Mumbai.

Professor Henderson’s research focuses on urbanisation in developing countries. He also covers topics such as land markets, infrastructure investment, corruption, and disaster aid delivery. He has provided recent policy advice several developing countries, including India.

Dr Perkins’s research interests include innovation diffusion and convergence, economic globalisation and environmental change, and environmental compliance and policy implementation. He has studied corporate environmentalism in India and published a comparative analysis of firms in three sectors—automobiles, steel, and power—of the Indian economy that are ‘greening’ in response to processes of international political engagement, market integration, and transnational social communication.

Dr Sanyal is Assistant Professor in Urban Geography. She is interested in issues of urbanisation, housing and citizenship rights. Her research has looked at the politics of developing refugee camps and colonies in Lebanon and India focusing primarily on refugees from 1947 and 1948. She has published several articles on this. Her interest in questions of citizenship, particularly in India, led to the publication of her co-edited book Urbanizing Citizenship: Contested Spaces in Indian Cities (Sage, 2011). Her recent work has ranged from looking at border politics to the aestheticisation of slums in South Asia.

Sumantra Bose is a scholar of comparative politics and international relations. His work includes several acclaimed books, including publications on the roots of conflict in Kashmir. His latest book, ‘Transforming India: Challenges to the World's Largest Democracy’, analyses the regionalisation of India’s politics and argues that third-generation Naxalism and Kashmir Valley unrest can be understood through the lens of regional identity and aspirations. Professor Bose is a citizen of India, where he spends a considerable proportion of his time.

Professor Dunleavy’s research interests include the development of public sector IT systems and other large-scale, modern public policy systems; analyses of public sector productivity, citizen redress and policy evaluation; rational choice theories of bureaucracy; the design of large-scale electoral systems; and modern political theory. He is also interested in electoral analysis and party politics, especially relating to the new concept of 'competition space'. Dr Dunleavy’s current work contrasts the electoral systems in India, the United Kingdom and the United States with proportional representation systems.

Dr Matus’ area of expertise is the development and application of innovative technology to address sustainable development. This includes exploring the potential of green chemistry as a so-called leapfrog technology in India, China, and the United States. Dr Matus is also involved in research on voluntary regulation and emerging institutional arrangements that promote sustainable development, especially the role of standards and certification in the development of more sustainable, "green" products and technologies in the global supply chain.

Professor Lord Stern is IG Patel Professor of Economics and Government, Chair of the Grantham Institute, and Director of LSE’s India Observatory. He was appointed President of the British Academy in July 2013. Professor Lord Stern’s research and publications have focused on the economics of climate change, economic development and growth, economic theory, tax reform, public policy and the role of the state and economies in transition. His recent work on India analyses economic development in the Indian village of Palanpur and documents the growing importance and influence of the nonfarm sector in the rural economy between the early 1980s and late 2000s.

Professor Dyson’s research interests include demographic transition, urbanization, migration, famines, world food prospects, HIV/AIDS, and the impact of demographic change on democratisation. He has published extensively on the past, present and future demography of the Indian subcontinent. With Robert Cassen and Leela Visaria, he was the editor of Twenty-first Century India: Population, Economy, Human Development, and the Environment, Oxford University Press, 2005.

Professor Forsyth specialises in political approaches to environmental change and international development. His research focuses on two key themes: The politics and governance of science and expertise within policy processes, especially for highly contested problems occurring in rapidly developing societies such as India; and the development of deliberative, multi-stakeholder forms of governance that can result in more development-friendly and environmentally effective policy solutions. Prof. Forsyth is currently conducting research on environmental and climate change policy, civil society and governance in several East Asian countries as well as India.

Professor Howell research focuses on the politics of aid and development policy, civil society, governance, and aid and security. She also has experience of gender, labour relations and the politics of policy processes. Professor Howell published on the impact in India of counter-terrorism policies post-9/11.

Professor Kaldor is Professor of Global Governance and Director of the Civil Society and Human Security Research Unit. She has published extensively on human security, organised violence in a global era, and the role of global civil society.

Dr Kar is a socio-cultural anthropologist focusing on economic anthropology of South Asia. In particular, she looks at the impact of financial inclusion, and the increasing financialisation on poverty and development programs. She is currently completing a book project looking at commercial microfinance in India based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Kolkata.

Dr Madon has researched the impact of ICTs on government reform initiatives in India for more than 15 years. Her current research studies the development impact of a selection of e-governance projects in India. These projects relate to ICT usage for improving the administration and planning of rural development programmes, e-services applications, telecentre projects, and health information systems.

Dr Masiero's research focuses on the politics of Indian anti-poverty policy, with a focus on the uptake of e-governance in social safety schemes. She is currently studying the role of digital technologies in state-level reforms of the Public Distribution System (PDS) and the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA). Her most recent publications explore the role of e-governance in redesigning the policy agendas underlying these schemes

Dr Mladovsky’s work focuses on health systems, health financing and migrant health. Between 2011 and 2014 Dr Mladovsky was scientific coordinator of Health Inc. (Financing health care for inclusion), an EU-funded research project launched in 2011 which explores how social exclusion restricts access to health services despite recent health financing reforms in Ghana, Senegal and the Indian states of Maharashtra and Karnataka. She is also coordinator, author and editor of several studies published by the World Health Organization and the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies. She has completed a PhD in health financing in low-income countries, with a particular focus on community-based health insurance in Senegal.

Dr Sequeira is a Lecturer in Development Economics and a research affiliate at STICERD. Her research applies a combination of experimental and quasi-experimental methods to four broad themes in development economics: infrastructure and growth, education, private sector development, and public service delivery.

Dr Shami’s research focuses on patron-client relationships established between peasants and their landlords. While historically landlords’ exploitative powers are argued to stem from the level of inequality in the rural economy, her research in Pakistan shows that it is the interaction of inequality with isolation that limits peasants exit options and creates a monopolist/monopsonist landlord. Dr Shami is currently exploring the types of collective action projects peasants undertake in villages with varying levels of connectivity.

Professor Shadlen works on the comparative and international political economy of development. His research on the global and cross-national politics of intellectual property brought him to India. He has two ongoing projects that involve research in (and about) India. The first is a STICERD-funded project (“Pharmaceutical Patents, Industry Transformation, and the Supply of Generic Drugs,” with Chirantan Chatterjee, IIM-Bangalore) which examines changing dynamics in the Indian pharmaceutical industry. The starting point is India's well-known role as provider of affordable, quality, non-patented drugs to developing countries. The project examines whether the introduction of pharmaceutical patents in India since 2005 plus incentives to compete in the more regulated and more lucrative OECD markets will reorient Indian firms away from developing countries (and the drugs needed by poor people in poor countries) and toward developed countries (and the drugs demanded in such markets). And as some firms shift their orientation, the project examines whether new firms fill the gap in supply. The second project involving India is ESRC-funded (“TRIPS Implementation and Secondary Pharmaceutical Patenting: An Empirical Analysis," with Bhaven Sampat, Columbia University), and examines how and to what extent countries' different approaches to pharmaceutical patents yield different outcomes in terms of levels of patent protection and degrees of generic pharmaceutical competition. The project focuses on a set of developing countries that adopted specific mechanisms to limit the grant of "secondary patents" in pharmaceuticals.

Dr Venugopal’s primary research interests are in the political sociology of development and violent conflict, particularly with reference to South Asia. He has researched and written on post-conflict reconstruction, nationalism, development aid, private sector development, and liberal peacebuilding. His recent publications on Sri Lanka explore the politics of market reform during conflict, post-conflict economics, and military fiscalism.

Adnan Khan is Deputy Executive Director and Research network Director of the IGC. His research interests lie in the areas of public economics and political economy. Khan’s is involved in an IGC research project to assess the role of wages, incentives, and audit on tax inspectors’ behaviour in Punjab, Pakistan.

Dr Sherman's research concerns the cultural and political history of India in the transition from colonial rule to independence in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Her research explores conceptions of citizenship, belonging and the idea of the minority in Indian politics; Arab and Afghan migration to and from India; early postcolonial democracy and the first elections; language politics, multilingualism and the creation of linguistic states; and violence and criminal justice in South Asia. Her first book was both a study of the many techniques of state coercion and a cultural history of the ways in which Indians imbue practices of punishment with their own meaning. She is currently working on a manuscript for a monograph on notions of citizenship amongst Muslims in early postcolonial India.

Dr Sood’s main fields of current interest lie in the Middle East and South Asia in early modern times, with a particular focus on the Mughal, Safavid and Ottoman empires. He has just finished a project that examines the daily lives of traders, pilgrims, scholars and other footloose types in order to recapture the connective tissue binding much of India and the Islamic heartlands before the nineteenth century. In so doing, light is shed on major but previously obscured facets of this region’s past, both in the context of the early modern world and of its differentiated transitions into modern times. Findings from this project have appeared in a number of scholarly journals, and its culmination is a book due to be published shortly by Cambridge University Press. With this project now at an end, Dr Sood has begun work on the next one, which pivots on the realities of everyday governance under the Islamic empires in the seventeenth century.

Dr Lankina’s current research focuses on the historical influences on sub-national democracy and authoritarianism in India and Russia. In particular, Dr Lankina explores the imperial and colonial human capital legacies and their developmental and democracy effects in these settings by analysing sub-national data that she has gathered. She has also recently published on the impact of Christian missionaries on India’s democratic development, finding that Christian missions operating throughout India influenced post-colonial democracy by promoting education, particularly female literacy.

Dr Bhatia’s research focuses on health systems in developing countries, including the economic evaluation of health programmes. His India-focused publications include studies on the cost-effectiveness of malaria control interventions; willingness to pay for insecticide-treated mosquito nets in Surat; and the demand side of financing for reproductive and child health services.

Dr Campbell’s research interests include public health intervention; health systems and inequality; participatory community development and community health. Her recent India-focused publications include a discussion of the role of community participation in improving mental health care in India as well as a case study from Orissa on improving maternal health through social accountability strategies.

Dr Divya Parmar is Research Officer in the Department of Social Policy and in LSE Health and Social Care. Her research investigated the underlying reasons for inequalities in access to health services in low and middle-income countries and how public programs can be made inclusive. She studies the impact of health programs and policies on demand, utilization, health outcomes, equity, and poverty reduction. She has worked extensively in India and Africa.

Dr Thambisetty has previously been the School’s first Regional Champion for India; and has a research interest in the intellectual property protection of biotechnological inventions, bioethics, and comparative patent law. She studies the effect of patents on innovation in emerging technologies and is particularly interested in the institutional structure of the patent system and its effect on the quality of legal doctrine, including in developing countries. She has been consulted by the UK Commission for Intellectual Property Rights, Justice Jackson’s Review of Civil Litigation Costs, the Nuffield Bioethics Council and the World Health Organisation, India. She has previously held the post of visiting Fellow at Imperial College, London where she worked on an EPRC funded project on synthetic biology. She is currently working on a EU Horizon 2020 funded five-year project (2015-2020) on the Nagoya Protocol and Marine Biodiversity Resources. She has written on the implications for India’s pharmaceutical industry of the Supreme Court decision to uphold the grant of the first compulsory license on a patented drug; India’s death penalty and criminal justice system; and accessibility legislation in India.

Dr Malagodi’s research interests include law and conflict, human rights, and comparative constitution law in South Asia. Her current research investigates patterns of exclusion of Nepal’s ethnolinguistic, religious and regional groups, dalits, women and LGBTs in the constitutional arena following the re-democratisation of 1990 by mapping Supreme Court’s decisions interpreting the Right to Equality.

Professor Appa is Emeritus Professor of Operational Research in the Department of Management. His research focuses on linear programming, the environmental impacts of large dams, integer programming, and data envelopment analysis. He has also studied the causes and effects of communal strife in India.

Mary Logan

Visiting Senior Fellow

Dr Logan's research focuses on organisational change, empowerment, and organisational identity issues. She has consulted in both the public and private sectors on issues surrounding organisational change and outsourcing.

Professor Willcock's major research interests include outsourcing, IT management, large-scale complex projects, organisational change, and IT measurement. He is also engaged in looking at technology in globalisation and the strategic use of IT, IT leadership, IT-enabled organisational change as well as business process outsourcing and offshoring, social theory and philosophy for information systems, and public sector IT Policy.

Dr Karrberg’s research interests include wireless and mobile technologies, service delivery platforms, software management, mobility, innovation, and business models. He has published on enterprise efficiency in the use of ICT in India and several European countries.

Professor Barkema is the founding Director of the Innovation Co-Creation Lab, which explores how to design innovative teams, innovation communities around websites, science parks and corporate campuses, and successful business model innovation in close cooperation with companies.

Professor Estrin's areas of research include labour and industrial economics, transition economics and economic development. He was formerly Adecco Professor of Business and Society at the London Business School where he was also the research director of the Centre for new and Emerging Markets, which analysed private sector development and business opportunities in emerging markets, including India. Professor Estrin’s India-specific research examined the role of informal institutions in corporate governance.

Associate Professor and Programme Director MSc in Media, Communication and Development

Dr. Shakuntala Banaji lectures on International Media and the Global South, Film theory and World Cinema, and Critical Approaches to Media, Communication and Development in the Department of Media and Communications at the LSE. She is UK Principal Investigator for two large funded projects (CATCH-EyoU, Horizon 2020 & MEC Personalised Media and Participatory Culture in the Middle East). Dr Banaji's research interests include the theory, history and textual study of cinema, particularly South Asian media and Hindi films; the socio-political contexts of audiences, representations of class, sexuality, gender and ethnicity; tensions between popular and elite media; internet cultures; online civic participation; young people, children and cultural identities. She is currently researching the politics, ideologies and pedagogies of different forms of citizenship and participation offered to children and young people via the internet and other media in Europe, the Middle East and India. In particular, she is examining the representation of children and young people in different forms of media, the ways in which participation and agency are construed based on class, religion and ethnicity, and what different groups of youth and children learn from or make of the media they access in their daily lives. Her academic books include South Asian Media Cultures, (Anthem Press 2010), The Civic Web: Young People, the Internet and Civic Participation (MIT Press 2013) and Children and Media in India (Routledge, 2017). She is also the author a mystery novel, Truth Lake, set in India.

A demographer with a particular interest in the inter-relationships between social context and demographic behaviour, approached using a combination of demographic and ethnographic methods. Dr Coast’s work focuses on relationships, including union formation, sexual behaviour and HIV/AIDS. She has previously published on gender-based violence and reproductive health in India.

Dr Kumar’s key research interests are related to urban poverty and urban housing in South Asia. He is also interested in the informal and formal institutions that act as an interface between these two aspects. His recent research work has focused on housing tenure and the urban poor in India, including studies of the urban poor as landlords and tenants and urban labour market changes.

Dr Leone is a demographer with a statistical background and her research focuses on reproductive maternal health and health systems in low-income countries. She has previously studied the role of social networks and community factors affecting family planning choices and overmedicalisation of births. Dr Leone is currently working on projects that analyse the effect of health systems reforms on health inequalities in India and Brazil. Her India-focused publications include studies on gender-based violence and reproductive health as well as the burden of maternal healthcare.

Professor Lewis’ research focuses on Bangladesh's politics and society, and particularly on how the country has been impacted by four decades of international development policies. His PhD research was based on fieldwork that explored the social and economic dimensions of village level technological change in agriculture during the late 1980s and he has regularly undertaken research in the region ever since. In 2011 he published Bangladesh: Politics, Economy and Civil Society (Cambridge University Press). David Lewis has also worked extensively on the roles of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and civil society actors in South Asia—mainly in Bangladesh but also in India, Nepal and Sri Lanka. An anthropologist by background, he has strong interests in ethnographic appraches to the study of organisations and policy processes. His most recent book is Anthropology and Development: Challenges For the 21st Century' (with Katy Gardner, Pluto, 2015).

Professor Bhatt is Director of LSE’s Centre for the Study of Human Rights. In addition to extensive work over many years on human rights, discrimination and social justice, Dr Bhatt's research interests include modern social theory and philosophy, early German Romanticism, the religious right and religious conflict, nationalism, racism and ethnicity, and the geopolitical sociology of South Asia and the Middle East. Current projects include work on new forms of the regional state in South Asia and the sociology of religious paramilitia groups. His previous Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship focused on the geosociology of religious violence and involved research on violent religious movements and militia in Pakistan, Kashmir, Afghanistan and India.

Dr Slater's research falls into three broad areas: the sociology of economic life (in particular, consumer culture and market society); the sociology of the internet and new media; and visual sociology (particularly photography and advertising). His new media research has focused on ethnographic approaches, particularly in the global South. He has previously conducted an ethnography of community radio and internet in rural Sri Lanka, which has been followed by a UNESCO programme of ethnographic action research with nine ICT projects in South Asia, and a two-year DfID-funded programme of comparative ethnographies of new media in India.

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